Besides, Felder and the co-founder of the foundation, Jack Bair, are saving their bullets for their big project: keeping the closed Cinema 21 in the Marina District from being turned into a Walgreens.

Felder and Bair started their foundation to keep the handful of old neighborhood theaters left in San Francisco from going the way of the silent movie. Their fight for the onetime Marina Theater on Chestnut Street comes to a head Thursday, when the city's Planning Commission will consider Planning Director Gerald Green's recommendation to give the go-ahead to the drugstore chain.

Even though the Cinema 21 has been closed for eight months, Felder and Bair say it's important to keep the building available for future theater use. Felder -- who works for the San Francisco Giants as transportation manager -- points to the throngs that crowded the Presidio, Chestnut Street's other movie house, to see "Spider-Man" last week.

"A single-screen theater can still draw quite a number of people to Chestnut Street, and will continue to do so," he said.

Both Felder and Bair -- who also works for the Giants, as the team's chief legal counsel -- come to this from urban backgrounds. As longtime city residents, each has a history of attachment to theaters such as the Cinema 21, the sort of movie house one could walk to from home.

"I used to go there (Cinema 21) on a regular basis," said Bair, 38, who lived in the Marina after graduating from Yale Law School. "To me, what makes San Francisco appealing are things like having a movie theater just around the corner."

Felder, 28, who grew up in Noe Valley, noted that that neighborhood used to have a movie house, the Noe Theater, which closed in the early '50s. Nowadays,

he said, "on 24th Street after 8 in the evening, it's surprisingly quiet."

Look at Mission Street, he continued. It used to have Cine Latino, the El Capitan and New Mission. "Then, that street always had activity in the evening.

Now Mission Street is bustling by day but not at night."

He has sentimental reasons for wanting to save Cinema 21. "I saw 'Watership Down' there when I was about 4," Felder said.

But it's not just nostalgia. In the 24 years since he saw that rabbit epic, Felder has been through the urban studies program at Harvard and has done graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley under former San Francisco planning director Allan Jacobs.

"It's important for the vitality of a city to be able to walk to the theater in your own neighborhood and see a film, have a relaxed experience and then walk to a place for dinner afterward," Felder said. "Theaters don't exist in most neighborhoods anymore. It means you lose a dominant evening use."

Along with Bair, the two created the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation in February. They set up a Web site -- www.sfneighborhoodtheater.org -- and asked people to list their names in support.

Now armed with the names of hundreds of backers, Felder and Bair are facing the economic force of a big company.

Walgreens says that to accommodate the needs of nearby residents, it needs more space than the 3,000 square feet it now occupies on Chestnut Street next to Cinema 21. By acquiring and expanding into the theater's larger space, company spokesman Michael Polzin said, the store could "add more hardware items, more toys and consumer products in response to what neighbors tell us they want."

Felder and Bair hope to persuade the Planning Commission to reject the plan,

or at least to delay it pending further study. To back up their pitch, they intend to cite a Board of Supervisors resolution, written by Supervisor Gavin Newsom and approved unanimously, urging a study of how theater closings affect the character and economy of their neighborhoods.

Even if they win, however, Felder and Bair will have to answer skeptics who point out that theater owner Ray Kaliski isn't exactly beating down the door to reopen Cinema 21. After all, old-time movie houses are closing because their owners can't make enough money in the face of pressure from the local multiplex.

"We'll have to look to creative solutions," Felder acknowledges. "Maybe it'll require a subsidy, maybe a takeover. It may be necessary for a nonprofit to step in to keep it operating."

The Planning Commission will take up the future of Cinema 21 when it meets Thursday at 1:30 p.m. in Room 400 at City Hall.

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